Turkey | 14th Architecture Biennale

Absorbing Modernity: “Places of Memory”
Pavilion of Turkey

The pavilion of Turkey at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, entitled “Places of Memory” is deeply linked to the personal experience of its curator, the architect Murat Tabanlıoğlu, who was born and currently lives in Istanbul. The exhibition is focused on three areas that Tabanlıoğlu deems particularly symbolic of the urban transformations of Istanbul over the last decades: Taksim, Bâb-ı Âli, and Büyükdere Boulevard. The analyzed transformations are not merely physical but have also an impact on people’s collective memory as well as on the psychological and perceptive background of every person that experienced them and is witnessing their evolution. Thus the exhibition, more than presenting a selection of architectural projects, is aimed to investigate the concept of what a “place” truly is.

Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies – a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national”.

Photos by Riccardo Bianchini, Inexhibit